{"id":4857,"date":"2016-09-04T01:37:30","date_gmt":"2016-09-04T05:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=4857"},"modified":"2016-09-04T01:37:30","modified_gmt":"2016-09-04T05:37:30","slug":"4th-day-in-paradise-the-tapering-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=4857","title":{"rendered":"4th Day in Paradise \u2013 The Tapering Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like some bad parody of a George M. Cohan musical number, I didn\u2019t want to get up this AM but you gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning. I had every intention of running a tapered 6 miler this morning but wound up doing an 8 mile run out past Kealia Beach. I got a later start thinking I would be running less and thus saw a bit more on my way out thanks to the sun creeping over the horizon. It was another spectacular morning.<\/p>\n

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\nReturning to the hotel, Mom and I sat outside on the beach, enjoying the sound of crashing waves and watching the sand crabs scurry about as if on their own hoverboards.<\/p>\n

With a promise of a mostly sunny day (as opposed to the previous day\u2019s forecasts of rain giving way to make-one-believe-in-higher-power sunshine), we thought we\u2019d visit the National Tropical Botanical Garden\u2122 out by Spouting Horn. I first took Mom to see the Opaekaa Falls, which also afforded an overhead lookout on the Wailea River where we had cruised to the Fern Grotto a few days before.<\/p>\n

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Before making the 40 minute trek to the southwestern end of Kauai, we stopped at this temporary bus stop that Mom and I found oddly hilarious.\u00a0 The cushioned dining room chairs feel like a poor choice in a rainy climate but, hey, they’re super comfortable when one is by the side of the road awaiting a bus.\u00a0 And kudos on providing a trash can to preclude littering!<\/p>\n

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A literal hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Poipu enabled us to grab lunch and sit by the sea wall. I actually think it\u2019s where the Marathon will finish tomorrow. I know it\u2019s where I sat about a year ago and had a plate lunch from a different hole-in-the-wall joint. There\u2019s a lot of holes and a lot of walls in Kauai\u2026 and most of them have pretty good food.
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\nFrom there, it was a short hop, skip, and a right turn into the Botanical Gardens. We opted for the guided tour of the Allerton Garden, a five \u201croom\u201d sprawling wonderland that National Geographic Traveler hailed as one of the 50 places to see in one\u2019s lifetime in the US. Robert Allerton and his longtime companion John Gregg Allerton would combine their artistic and architectural know-how to cultivate a majestic natural preserve and landscape magnum opus. Our guide was Dave Flowers (his surname really was Flowers and he said his kids felt it was destiny that he would wind up here after recovering from a misspent life as a lawyer \u2013 he said he was okay with that). It was one of those tours where the guide so clearly has a passion and love for the place and what it means that one can\u2019t help but be swept up into the experience. Dave focused on narratives and backstories of the \u201crooms\u201d (which are discrete segments of the 83 acre gardens) and would also point out botanical beauties without delving too far into scientific minutiae that would have had my eyes glaze over.
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\nSome select snapshots from the tour, including a tag-a-long duck named Henry and a few trees that appeared in Jurassic Park (1993):
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\nAfter the 2.5 hour walking tour, we headed back to our hotel. A somewhat surprisingly disappointing dinner at the local \u201chome cooking\u201d restaurant has given way to an early night. MY alarm is set for 3:30 AM tomorrow, allowing us ample time to drive the 45 minutes to the start line. The big downside to this location is that drive to the race but there\u2019s a lot of upside too \u2013 like this view for example, taken as Mom and I sat on a log this morning:
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\nAnd so as the sun sets once more in paradise, I prepare for the dawn. It\u2019s not a training run. It\u2019s a 26.2 mile marathon.<\/p>\n

I gotta get up. I gotta get up. I gotta get up in the morning.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow \u2013 I run. Mom cheers. And there may be a celebratory drink for Hawaii dodging a hurricane. Or so I hope. As Dave reminded us at the Allerton \u2013 Hurricane Iniki turned on a dime in September 1992 and though it passed all the other islands of Hawaii, it changed course in the evening and caught Kauai off guard. They don\u2019t know how high the winds got as the anemometer disintegrated when Iniki\u2019s winds hit 227 mph.<\/p>\n

Thus, even though at present all forecasts and models show Hurricane Lester having missed Hawaii, I\u2019m not taking anything for granted\u2026 all the more so as Hurricane Hermine is devastating the East Coast of the mainland\u2026 having started in my home state of Florida and continued on a rampage north. Fingers crossed all are safe and whatever damage is just things and stuff, all that can be replaced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like some bad parody of a George M. Cohan musical number, I didn\u2019t want to get up this AM but you gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning. I had every intention of running a tapered 6 miler this morning but wound up doing an 8 mile run […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}